Travellers in Adelaide may soon be able to catch a driverless airport shuttle and students will be able to book a self-driving shuttle around Flinders University.

South Australia is leading the country in the push toward self-driving cars. It was the first state to allow on-road trials of driverless cars and has pledged $5.6 million to a range of driverless services.

"In my city we have a strategic plan for the next four years that includes the implementation of autonomous technology and we're building the infrastructure that will enable it to be used in the city," said a City of Adelaide adviser, Steve Harrison.

He told a parliamentary committee into the new technology in Canberra that the city was working in partnership with business on the infrastructure.

Australian Zoox co-founder Tim Kentley-Klay's driverless cars should be ready to go in 2020 – if all goes to plan.

"We've pulled it off...without any funding from the council. It's more about us providing the conduit, access to that conduit and the ability to put up wireless devices in the city," he said.

Related Quotes

Company Profile

The federal inquiry into the social implications of driverless vehicles has received 43 submissions from a range of organisations and companies such as Toyota, Volvo, the Australian Automobile Association and Telstra.

The submissions cover the likely job losses to be caused by the shift to self-driving trains, buses, trucks and cars to the safety issues that will need to be tackled as the transition occurs and some vehicles on the road are driven by humans, while others are autonomous.

Council of Capital City Lord Mayors director Deborah Wilkinson said the state was already witnessing people under 24 abandoning car ownership.

"In Adelaide we have apartment projects where there's three or four cars shared by the owners of the apartments, but the building owns the vehicles... It's becoming quite common in the US too," Ms Wilkinson said.

And not just in SA; a 2015 study by a Monash University lecturer showed licensing rates for people under 25 had fallen from 77 per cent in 2001 to 66 per cent in Victoria.

While major advances are being made, Mr Harrison feared Australia was moving too slowly in preparing legislation for the significant changes.

"Looking at the speed of change now... we could see autonomous vehicles in the city streets within five years on the intelligence we're receiving, but we're not sure the policies will be in place to manage a market that demands these vehicles," he said.

The push to develop driverless car technologies is being led by major tech giants such as Uber, Google and Tesla, but increasingly smaller companies are also making plays in the space.

A young hacker in the US, George Hotz, in November gave away the code for self-driving car software claimed to be as good as Tesla's Autopilot 7.